Les Coleman, who has died aged 67, was an artist, sculptor, author, aphorist,
latter-day Dada-ist and all-round rare bird who preferred his work to evoke
subtle grins rather than highbrow critiques.

As an artist, he showed the ability to create something good out of nothing. His mini-sculpture England v Italy (1981), featuring an electric fire face to face with an electric fan – and sharing the same plug – was as thought-provoking as his vertical and horizontal assembly Live and Dead Batteries (1982) or his Crossfire (1982, reinvented 2007), which showed a wall with hundreds of arrow heads and flights protruding in and out of it.

As an author, Coleman made an immediate impact with The Jewish Banana (1973), a collection of lewd comic drawings . Two decades later this was followed by five small volumes of aphorisms — Unthoughts (1991), Unthinking (1993), Unthunk (2002), Thunks (2007) and Afterthunks (2011) — containing observations such as “Abandoned on the lawn the skipping rope’s life ebbed away” and “Didn’t I see you down at the Déjà-vu club?” Les Coleman knew that, like the haiku and Zen koan, a lot can come from a little.

Born at Kirk Ella, near Hull, on May 6 1945, Leslie Bruce Coleman was the son of a scientist working on the wind tunnel at Fairey Aviation (later British Aerospace). Les was sent to board at the Quaker St Christopher School, Letchworth, where he began a lifelong friendship with the actor David Horovitch .

In the early 1960s Coleman enrolled in the new Art and Design course at Leeds College of Art. There he did his student dissertation on NF Simpson, the author of One-Way Pendulum and, in 1964, made friends with the resident lecturer, artist and writer Patrick Hughes, who would introduce him to figures such as Anthony Earnshaw and René Magritte’s great friend Marcel Marien. It was Marien who would later publish Coleman’s writings in his Belgium-based magazine Les Lèvres Nues.

Bouncy, smiley, sometimes moody and often garrulous, Coleman would spend most of his adult life in London, occupying various small flats in Battersea and Tooting.

In fallow periods he worked as a painter and decorator – he memorably reinvented the Mr Freedom shop in Kensington – or taught in art schools. During a stint at Newcastle Polytechnic in the 1980s he made an error of judgment by advising a young student called Chris Donald to wait till he got his degree before starting a magazine. Donald ignored his teacher’s advice, left college and started the hugely successful and scurrilous Viz.

While teaching, Coleman also gathered material for his uproarious warts-and-all book Meet the Art Students (1997), followed by the flatter and less successful The Professors (2002).

Though increasingly addicted to his own work, Coleman was a lifelong connoisseur and collector of other people’s cartoons. His home was always plastered with works by Larry, Sine, Donald McGill, HM Bateman, Saul Steinberg, Art Spiegelman, Bill Griffiths, Robert Crumb and other artists.

Between these various projects, love affairs with at least one famous beauty, and occasional bouts on “the merry-go-round of despondency”, Coleman cycled all over Britain. In 1986 — along with Patrick Hughes, Dudley Winterbottom (Secretary of the Chelsea Arts Club), his son Max Coleman and several others — he rode from John O’Groats to Land’s End. He also pedalled from the Irish Sea to the North Sea and was a devotee of the daylong country walk. On a series of successive Midsummer Days, he and his friends walked along the Thames from Kew Gardens to its source in the Cotswolds.

Shortly before being diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, Coleman produced a book on his hero, Anthony Earnshaw, The Imp of Surrealism (2011) .

Les Coleman is survived by his son and daughter by Jonet Harley-Peters .